7 Unanswered Questions in Collage

byEric EdelmanonJanuary 29, 2013

What is the nature of reality? Is reality the same for everyone, or does each of us have a different and unique reality?

In experiments done over a century ago, a physicist established that what we regard as solid matter is largely empty space. The tabletop under our dishes, the bookshelf holding our books, the dishes and books themselves, our bodies, and the earth beneath us: all of this is void in which tiny concentrations of mass float, widely separated from each other. Yet what we call solid feels hard to us. It does not yield to our touch, and no solid may penetrate another without partly destroying it.

So what is our sense of the solidity of things? Do we create it from a collage of sensations that we are convinced is real? But if the physics experiments are correct, then our senses deceive us about reality. And if this is so, how else are we deceived? How else is our reality unreal?

Yet if we do create from our sense impressions a certain so-called reality, are we not also free to create a different version of it? Perhaps the popular idea that each of us creates his or her own reality is truer than we realize.

Thanks very much for your kind comment, Alissa! Of all the images in this collage, the ear butterfly (given to me in black and white by a dear friend) was perhaps the most fun to colorize. I’m happy that it pleased you. Have a great WW!

I agree with some of what you say. However, I am very confident in my senses. After all, how I perceive reality I relate only to me. I do have the ability and intelligence to also be sensitive to the perceptions of others and try to understand their reality also.

I’ve always wondered, where does subjectivity end and objectivity begin. Is everything subjective? There are certain facts we can all agree on through our senses that make up the construct we call reality (though we certainly don’t agree on all) – so this indicates some sort of subjective “reality” out there, but then where does that come from? It seems there is a “grey” area, but life has always been about degrees of things and not the black-and-white some would try to force on us. Anyway, interesting stuff.

Thanks for your comment, Matthew. Personally, I do believe that everything is ultimately subjective–because since we rely on our senses (or extensions of them like scientific instruments) to measure the physical world outside of our consciousnesses, no two of us will ever agree absolutely on all aspects of our “shared reality.” Objectivity, or an objective reality, would seem to require that its “look and feel” would always seem the same to each of us…and yet they don’t. The look and feel of what we deem to be reality even seem different to any given person at different times.

I think that philosophers like Plato and Kant had a largely correct idea of our relationship to the world outside us: that at some level, it could never be known separate from our sense perceptions and emotions, but could only be imagined. An interesting clue to this is furnished by the example of mathematics; more particularly by Euclidean geometry, in which objects like points, lines, planes, and solids are stripped of every physical attribute except position. Euclidean geometry is an example of “objectivity,” in that two people working to solve the same geometric problem independently of each other will always arrive at the same answer, if they work correctly according to the axioms and postulates of that geometry. But I would argue that this is only possible because of the non-physical nature of geometry.